Nursery school graduation

What's wrong with this picture? Click to enlarge and see facial bruising. Age 3. Using magnifying glass on enlarged version, you can see right tear duct is blocked.

In spin we trust

Last month I posted in Grace Uncensored how my system conveyed to me that someone in my workplace was giving instructions to an alter. With a large format collage, I was shown the job of the alter, the person providing the signal, and showing me the telephone was used to convey the signal. Images depicted the alter becoming dizzy while on the telephone. Knowing someone knew I grew up DID and trained was unnerving and I was terrified to return to work. Motivation for income allowed me to return...but how to be safe and stop responding?

Before returning to work from my short-term leave to pick myself up from the onslaught of early memories after my DID beginning to show, I found this single image in a magazine. Amazingly, in using images, survivors will find they begin to recognize alters because all of their images look like the same person even when it isn't the same model in the magazine. It might be a nudge from inside saying "that's her" or "that's me" or a feeling of knowing. Realizing this image went with the collage about my being used at work game me the piece I needed to no longer be triggered into the alter state. I described in my blog entry how I was able to disconnect from the cue. Scary stuff.

Lips

This collage was a mystery for several months. Its meaning is something no normal person's brain would ever figure out. I won't say what it means because of the high triggering factor. Once I knew though, it made all the sense in the world. The bad guys made sure that silence was a well instilled message. I can't imagine a more traumatic thing to do to a child--to any living entity. I would have been about five. Symbols, while initially out of my awareness, became important for connecting collages to one another to show me a memory. For instance, the heart at the bottom of the collage is the profile of a woman in a lipstick ad turned sideways. Hearts went with Lucy and this went with her huge trauma memory which also goes with lips.

The middle right image is another part of me. I first came to know her by the artist whose work often appeared in Communication Arts, the main source of my images. Nearly every item on my collages came to have significance...and it remained benign until I was internally given the meaning, always causing a significant eek factor.

Hate him

An example of one of my childhood photos cut out and positioned on a bench. The two photos were from a vacation I took in England at a church. Notice the gorilla arm. Pictures of gorilla masks and real gorillas. Intentional confusion? Lots of images of benches. Scary unknown meaning. One of earliest memories was with father at a graveyard holding gun to my head at dug out grave. He fired but it was empty. To this day, hearing a misfired gun in movies or television causes a greater PTSD reaction than gun being fired. Unknown meaning to above collage...just random thoughts.

Lucy

Audrey (top left) and Lucy were two of the first littles I knew. I was shown that Audrey existed first and her job was to hold physical and emotional pain. Audrey became too overwhelmed and split off creating Lucy whose job was to hold shame and guilt. The last picture is Lucy healed as a child. She appears as a young adult in other images; although she did not "grow up". With DID, it is possible to have the same alter at various ages, each existing as a separate self state.